Shittily Reviewing Movies That I’ve Seen This Year

15/7/26

I recently acquired some new friends. I quite like them. One of them in particular seems to enjoy going to the cinema more than what I believe to be average. She is one of the sweetest people I’ve ever come across, and if I’m being frank, she could ask us to watch deep web kidnap and torture livestream and I’d vouch for her. She would never ask for that, though; cuter and more bubbly pictures seem more up her alley.

This isn’t to understate the role that many others have played, of course, I just think that she was the one to get the ball rolling. I think I’ve seen more films in the few months that I’ve known her than in the five years previous.

Anywho, here’s the reviews, don’t take them too seriously, they’re nothing more than my personal opinions, blah blah.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

It was… fine?

I adored the original 28 Days Later, and how the apocalypse was more of a backdrop for the horror of how people treated each other in such a scenario. The Bone Temple continued this theme, which I can only assume the preceding two films did also, I didn’t actually watch them. I just saw that my local cinema was showing the newest 28 Days Later and asked my friends to join me.

Most of the gore was concentrated in the first half of the film and projected onto characters who were never named or had any impact on the plot…? Odd choice in my opinion. I can only imagine that the pregnant lady who escaped her family’s torture will have something to do with the inevitable fifth film in the franchise, even if we didn’t get any glimpse of her after her escape.

The part that I always told people as my official review, is that part of the climax is a man lip syncing to metal records while pretending to be Satan in order to appease a satanic cult led by a man imitating Jimmy Saville. I had no idea how seriously I was supposed to take the film at that point.

At least we got to see Cillian Murphy for a couple minutes at the end. At least he’s doing okay.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

…okay I don’t really do kid’s media. I have nothing at all against people who do; if anything, I think they’re crucial to the media landscape and help to get better writers that kid’s media deserves. I like you, but I am not one of you. This fact makes it a little difficult to say much about this movie.

I only watched it because a friend wanted to see it, and for that it was a fun experience. The animation was good (as you’d expect from such a high budget), the story was fine, your kids will probably like it. Maybe the direction could’ve been improved, as the same friend noted that things sorta, just… happened, one after the other. I think if you left the room for one scene, it’d be hard to figure out how the next one was related to anything previously shown. But I think it was fine overall.

I really don’t have much to say here. I’ve never played a Mario game in my life.

Backrooms

Please don’t kill me for this, but it wasn’t half as good as everyone is saying.

I mean, it’s now AWFUL. The camerawork was brilliant, the visuals were gorgeous (as far as you can consider the Backrooms Signature Yellow to be aesthetically appealing in any sense), but the pacing? The actual plot?There was no need for that film to be a full two hours long, for a start. Not enough happened to justify the running time. The atmosphere was well established early on, the runtime only dampened it. Tension was replaced with boredom.

Many interesting concepts were introduced and not expanded on. The research foundation POV at the start could’ve been the whole movie. The same can be said for the found footage style exploration with Clark’s employees. These are instead shoved into the first half of the film, way before the actual story kicks in. Even towards the ‘meat’ of the story, the idea of other humans being lost in the backrooms is thrown in and never explored. We don’t meet any humans that we didn’t see in the first 30 minutes. I just feel like so much could’ve been done with any of these things, especially given how long the film is.

I did love the dinner table scene, you know the one. The setup and execution were delicious. I won’t even talk about anything that happened, just go and watch it. I’d almost say that it was worth sitting through the rest of the film just to get there.

The gloomy aesthetic wasn’t enough to carry the entire film the way that I feel it was supposed to, but it’s far from unwatchable. I couldn’t describe it as either good or bad, maybe just wasted potential. I’m tempted to use un-good as a descriptor.

Iron Lung

I wanted to watch this in the cinema, but all of my friends had already watched it with their partners, so I settled to maybe one day stream it by myself. Thankfully we did get together one night to give it another go. The main thing that I noted was that this felt like it was made to be put in cinema; the claustrophobic atmosphere could only have been heightened by watching in a dark, silent, enclosed area. Maybe watching this in someone’s living room with their cats and young siblings taking up the sofa wasn’t the best environment.

I almost wanted to hate this, to be my cynical self and declare it a stain on cinema (as if I’m anything close to a cinephile), but I actually really liked this. I did cut it a lot of slack, though; it’s good for a 2 hour self funded directional debut based on a 1 hour video game that already felt too long.

I didn’t understand the need to try and flesh out the convict’s backstory. I didn’t like how vague it remained even after the fleshing out. I don’t recall anything that alludes to the convict’s crimes in the video game, but I could easily be wrong about that. It still threw me off.

The obvious point of criticism is that the film was absolutely too long. As much as I enjoyed my time watching it, I didn’t see anything that justified a 2 hour run time. I don’t even think that the run time detracted from the immersion - it just didn’t add to it.

You get used to Markiplier being the main actor quite quickly. His acting isn’t perfect, but it’s plenty fine to carry us through the movie - even if the falling over segments needed more work.

Everything else, though… The atmosphere is rich and tense. The setting makes you feel trapped too.

The finale takes its time, a wonderful breather from how a lot of films feel rushed towards the end for me. All buildups are slow and steady, and even though the film could do with being shorter, the first and final acts both had great pacing.

God, the visual effects were wonderful. I want more blood in all my movies now. Big fan of the sea creature.

I’m running out of things to say here. I liked this movie. I’m so glad that I liked it.

The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act

Okay I only watched this because I wanted to be able to say that I was one of the freaks who saw the Digital Circus in the cinema. This didn’t lean into Harlan Ellison’s original work as much as I hoped, which was also a huge reason I watched the show.

It was fine as an episode of The Amazing Digital Circus, but as a finale…?

I actually wrote a good few paragraphs in my notes app on why this didn’t land for me, but to summarise: Jax’s story came at the cost of pretty much every other character, the main plot twist was resolved almost instantly, Caine was redeemed far too easily.

The obvious reason for all of this was that an indie show only has so much time to work with. It’s hard to wrap so much up into one episode. That doesn’t stop the episode from being bad.

I think we got more time with Gummigoo dealing with being an NPC in episode 2 than we did with Gangle dealing with her bully committing suicide. That one sentence could have worked as the whole review, actually.

To be honest, I don’t want to spend much time with this film, considering the fucking outrage surrounding it, and the fact that I’d have to sift through the whole show over again to pick apart the finale properly. Let’s leave this one. It sucked and that’s okay.

Obsession

I haven’t actually watched that many horror films this year, so maybe this isn’t a high bar, but this is the most terrifying film that I’ve seen in a long time.

The camera work was… unique. I understand how it might be boring or uninspired to some. I found it a little unnerving, in a way. It almost felt as though we were watching Nikki and Bear directly through each others’ eyes. I liked it.

I have to comment on how loud this film was. I’ve never seen a film that was so fucking loud in my life. At times, it was too exaggerated to take seriously, and pulled us out of the immersion. Doubly true for the person who had to leave the theatre for a few minutes.

I loved each and every haunting glimpse into how Nikki truly feels about Bear. From the dead look on her face as he forces himself onto her, the most uncanny scene of her looming in the dark, her begging for death as the film finally loses any subtlety, all of it was harrowingly well executed.

If anything, my only complaint is that Bear got off pretty easy, all things considered. While his end was, unsavoury, he never fully faces retribution for his actions. Especially not compared to Nikki. Poor Nikki.

I don’t know how I have so little to say here. Go watch this movie before twitter tells you it’s overrated.

Project Hail Mary

As a preface, I missed the first half hour of this one. I didn’t even know we were watching a movie when I arrived at my friend’s house and saw what I initially thought was Garrett Watts on the screen. Odds are that I probably wouldn’t have watched this on my own volition.

This was an incredibly enjoyable movie. One of the first things I was told when I arrived was that almost everything on screen was made with practical effects; this immediately heightened my opinion on everything on screen. Every piece of scenery in space was mesmerising. The only break I took from watching was to look up how Rocky was made.

On the topic of Rocky, he was incredibly fun to watch. Just… everything about him. He’s adorable. That’s all I need to say.

I mean, the movie was fun. I had a lot of fun watching this movie. It doesn’t do anything profound, nor does it try to. Now that I think about it, it does feel a little dated to the early-mid 2010s in its subject matter, particularly in climate change being a core of the setup without this being explored too deeply. I’ve never read the book, nor have I ever had the urge to maybe until recently, just for comparison's sake, so I don’t know how this holds up as an adaptation. Project Hail Mary is a charming flick that will keep most people thoroughly entertained for two and a half heartfelt hours.

As a side note, when I checked if I was spelling Garrett Watts’ name correctly, I found out that he’s actually still making videos. Good for him, I guess. I wasn’t expecting that though. Do people still watch him?

Honorable mentions go to The Shape of Water and Get Out, both of which I watched alone in my room back to back and thought were incredible.

…god, when I was talking about that one friend earlier, yeah? I think I was exaggerating how ‘cute’ her taste is - she was just as excited to watch The Backrooms as the rest of us - and I was seriously about to suggest that I was mischaracterising her like she was from a fucking TV show. I know I absorbed that word into my general vernacular through years of spectating fandom discourse. Fuck me.

If you got here, I want you to know that I ended up taking my mum with me to watch Obsession, since she wanted to go to the cinema at some point and all of my friends had already seen it with their boyfriends. Don't, um, do that, please.